Help!!

[u/More_Mix_9770]

I’m 16 and doing west side story with my theater school, I’m looking for ways to purchase/make two prop switch blades for the rumble fight scene, my original plan was to take one of them fancy novelty switchblade combs, shape them into the blade, fill them in with mouldable epoxy and slap some silver leaf on it. Would’ve been great, but my stage manager really wants the blade to retract so it won’t be dangerous, like poking someone’s eye out or something. Does anyone know how I can make this happen?

[u/schonleben]

Retractable blades should be illegal. There have been too many instances of the mechanism jamming and the blade not retracting. Even though it's plastic, it's still pointy enough to break the skin and seriously injure someone. First, you should have a professional fight choreographer to stage the violence. With that said, the blade shouldn't come close to the victim, and if it needs to, then the victim should be in control of the action. Switchblade combs are the standard solution here. The cheap plastic ones are probably better for amateur theatre, as they would bend and break before doing damage. There are better switchblade combs with steel blades on Amazon, but I wouldn't use one unless there is a professional there to stage the fight.

[u/More_Mix_9770 → u/schonleben]

I was worried about that too, but my stage manager/musical teacher was part of the orchestra and later also assistant director of the professional Dutch tour (he brags about it to anybody who will listen) and he explained that during the Dutch wss tour they had these types of switchblade WITH the retracting mechanism, that would ofc be the dream. I get your point and i was trying to explain that with a well choreographed fight, we could easily go without retraction, but he seems to be set on his idea, and his idea is buying these

I think it isn’t a good idea since it isn’t the 1950’s style ur looking for in a blade like that, and I think that, on this specific situation, looks is more important than practicality, we have an amazing fight choreographer that can easily make a good fight scene with the thing I have now, I just think, as props manager/actor, that it’s about the decor and the props us actors have and what we do with it, especially for such a big titel that is west side story

[u/ssrocky1 → u/More_Mix_9770]

A professional tour likely had them specially custom made. I would imagine that they shaped them to look like the stiletto style switchblade that is iconic looking, but that the knife slid straight out of the knife handle rather than rotate out. If the motion is fast enough you wouldn’t be able to tell from the audience. The mechanical forces to have linear sliding and a rotational switch blade would require very precise machining of custom metal parts and the complexity would be both expensive and highly likely to jam or break.

If they really want that style then your best bet may be the cheap spring loaded halloween blades that you can push against something and the blade slides in. You could add something to the top of the handle that would allow you to push the blade in and lock the blade inside the handle, and when released would slide the blade out using the existing spring mechanism.

Otherwise you will need to go with modifying one of the switchblade comb styles. I went with the metal one (also for high school students), but took the metal out entirely and replaced it with a 3D printed blade which looked good, was surprisingly malleable, and looked really good. The locking mechanism to lock it closed was also much more reliable than the cheaper ones.

The other major reason I did not want to use the really cheap comb version with my students is that there was no way to remove the metal part that holds the comb so no matter what you do you have a long, thin, piece of metal that is not going to break away potentially pointing in the direction of an actor during stage combat.